Celebrating Black History Month and the Black-Owned Business: Success Mixed with Blood, Sweat & Tears
Allen Franklin in front of the building on Martin Street that housed F&H Printing and Squiggy’s Hair Salon during the 1990s.
By Jonathan Gramling
While Allen Franklin was born in northern Georgia and grew up in South Carolina, he has lived in Madison since he was 15-years-old when he joined his brother in 1969. Franklin has always been a hard-working man. While many his age have already retired, Franklin still sells cars for Smart Motors, always trying to keep his customers satisfied. But for roughly 20 years of his time in Madison, Franklin was part-owner and production manager of one of the largest and most successful Black-owned businesses in Madison’s history.
Franklin took printing in high school and studied to become a journeyman printer.
“Initially after high school, I worked for Webcrafters Printing & Publishing on Fordem Avenue,” Allen recalled. “I only worked for them short-term about a year. My brother was working there and he left. From there, I went to Ray-O-Vac on Schroeder Road and was printing for ESP Battery Corp. We did the printing for the AAA batteries and alkaline batteries, so we printed a lot of pricing for them for the battery pack. We also printed promotion and marketing items.”
Franklin was then ready to take on some management responsibilities while still practicing his printing craft.
“After working for Ray-O-Vac from 1972-1979, I was approached about running a printing company for the American Cancer Society off of Sherman Avenue. I did the printing for the state of Wisconsin except for the Milwaukee division. It gave me a lot more outside printing experience and people accepted my quality of printing. I worked for them from 1979-1980. And then I went to work for Paradise Printing. Paradise Printing terminated me in June 1981.”
Franklin decided to take matters into his own hands and together with Syd Forbes and investor David Hammonds, Franklin started FF&H Printing in the Park Square building on S. Park Street on February 8, 1982. It was a small operation at first with only 800 sq. ft. but they quickly grew.
“We were one of the first Black-owned businesses that produced for the larger market in the Madison area,” Franklin recalled. “It was a challenge. But we met the challenge with knowing our product and what we could produce and what we couldn’t produce. You have to know what your resources are with that in order to stay on top of your game. Sometimes I had to farm something out to complete what I had done at our location. And then for things like binding or crash numbering, I had to farm that out because we didn’t have the capabilities of doing it, but it was all part of the printing business.”
Madison was an excellent place to start a printing business. With the University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin state government and several large private corporations as a base, there was a lot of printing to be done.
“I got good support from people like Clarence and Ron Thorstad,” Franklin said. “I also got support from the family that owned the Pepsi Cola franchise, Doug Malmquist, which was located on Broadway. They supported me a lot. I got business from WPS, the state of Wisconsin, the postal service and the legislative library printing documents and booklets. Another big supporter of ours was Bob Gorsuch and Park Bank. They gave us a lot of printing. I had a lot of great support. One of the great things was people believed in me and gave me the opportunity.”
When contracts started coming in from the state of Wisconsin, the company really took off.
“We outgrew our space quickly because my good friend Joe McClain who worked at DILHR at the time approached me to bid on some state contracts,” Franklin recalled. “And when I bid on them, I didn’t realize what I was bidding on and then all of a sudden, I was flooded with paper and I was flooded with different pallets of paper that I had nowhere to put them. And I got WI Dept. of Administration contracts. We moved into the front of Park Square. I took up the whole 1,500 sq. ft. upstairs and took over the 3,000 sq. ft. downstairs for production.”
Business was going gangbuster and at its height, F&H Printing — the company reorganized — employed 16-17 people.
“We were going day and night sometimes because of the fact I had a weekend shift and a regular week shift because we didn’t get the state legislative document until Friday night at 4:30 p.m. and we had to produce anywhere from one page to a 2,000 page booklet — print, collate and bind — by 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning,” Franklin said. “It was crunch time.”
F&H Printing also did a lot of walk-in business.
“I used to print thousands and thousands pieces of letterhead and envelopes and resumes, things like that for customers,” Franklin said. “But when desktop publishing came about, that took away some of that business. Everyone was a graphic artist. They did their own. That changed a lot of things back then. We used to do maybe 50-150 resumes and envelopes for people every month.”
And by 1991, F&H Printing had moved again.
“We bought that building in 1991,” Franklin said about him and his wife Squeaky. “We got married in 1990 and she closed her business in Milwaukee and moved to Madison. She had about 1,100 sq. ft. for her beauty shop and I had about 8,900 sq. ft. For the printing business. That was located on Martin Street. That was the hay day. We grew and we grew and we grew. It was a good run.”
Franklin took pride in the quality of his work.
“F&H Printing produced the very first Bucky Book in Dane County,” Franklin recalled. “We produced that back in 1987-1988. There was a guy by the name of John Fish who was a great guy to work with. But as his book got popular, we just couldn’t keep up and he wanted to add multiple colors and things like that. I look at that book today and I appreciate that I had something to do with helping to start it.”
The beginning of the end for F&H Printing began in the late 1990s with the advent of the digital revolution and the downsizing and restructuring of Corporate America.
“We knew that with the Ameritech situation with Wisconsin Bell and then the downsizing in Corporate America in 1998 to early 2000 with Y2K, we knew things were going to change,” Franklin said. “We lost Ameritech, which was one of my bigger accounts and it was a strain on my cash flow. My financial institutions and I both knew that. When Wisconsin Bell was sold to Ameritech, that took out $500,000 a year from the business. They wanted me to produce it for half to three-quarters of the amount that I was doing it for and then use Docutechs so that they could benefit from their copying business at their locations. I wasn’t willing to do that.”
By 2002, F&H Printing was closing its doors and by 2005, Franklin was in the car sales business first with Jon Lancaster and then with Smart motors. While Franklin put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into F&H Printing, he knew when it was time to move on.
“The main thing with Black-owned business is number one it’s not that I was so much undercapitalized,” Franklin observed. “It’s just how the business changed. You have to grow with the business. If you can’t make the changes right away to keep up, especially the way that digital technology came and just took over, that’s when you have to keep up or leave the business.”
The most important thing to Franklin wasn’t the printing or owning a business or being well-known in the community. It was all about the people who worked for him.
